{"id":115,"date":"2007-06-16T14:00:48","date_gmt":"2007-06-16T14:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/115"},"modified":"2015-01-29T06:52:24","modified_gmt":"2015-01-29T11:52:24","slug":"trinity-monotheism-part-9-some-final-thoughts-and-objections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/trinity-monotheism-part-9-some-final-thoughts-and-objections\/","title":{"rendered":"Trinity Monotheism Part 9: Some final thoughts and objections"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.trinities.org\/blog\/?s=Trinity+Monotheism&amp;searchsubmit=Find\">Time to close out this long series<\/a> with a brief summary of <strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/downdog1.jpg\" alt=\"downdog1.jpg\" width=\"471\" height=\"350\" \/>my own observations on and objections to Trinity Monotheism<\/strong>. These aren&#8217;t all the one&#8217;s I&#8217;ve mentioned, but only the ones I think are the most relevant. And I should say that Joseph has raised some others as well, both in <a title=\"Jedwab on Trinity Monotheism\" href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/94\" target=\"_blank\">his guest post<\/a> and in his comments.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>The whole parts issue is a distraction<\/strong>. <a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/92\">Their view is<\/a> that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are God&#8217;s three minds or centers of consciousness. We don&#8217;t normally think of faculties, abilities, thoughts, or streams of consciousness as parts of a thing, but it doesn&#8217;t matter either way, because:<\/li>\n<li><strong>Trinity Monotheism is a kind of <a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/17\">FSH modalism<\/a><\/strong>. This fact is obscured by the talk of these &#8220;minds&#8221; (faculties of thought, or the thoughts which are the exercise of those faculties) as &#8220;persons&#8221; as &#8220;individuals&#8221;, and parts of God. It seems to me they&#8217;re mind-terminology is a little unclear &#8211; a mind can be (1) a thinking thing (soul), or (2) a faculty\/ability of a thing, to think, or (3) the exercise of such a faculty. They don&#8217;t mean (1), because they hold that God is a soul, but none of the persons are. They&#8217;re a little unclear between (2) and (3), but Joseph helped me see that they probably have (3) in mind &#8211; a &#8220;mind&#8221; here is supposed to be a unified collection of God&#8217;s thoughts. But either way ((2) or (3)), it&#8217;s modalism &#8211; the difference is only between one kind of mode (of God) and another. I <em>don&#8217;t<\/em> in saying this <a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/38\">dismiss it as heretical<\/a>, but:<\/li>\n<li><strong>As such, it&#8217;s subject to my objections <a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/19\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/42\">here<\/a> to any kind of modalism about the Son<\/strong>. I hold these to be fatal. (Also: consider <a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/96\">their own objections to Logos christologies<\/a>, and their <a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/97\">objection to Group Mind Monotheism re: &#8220;subminds&#8221;<\/a>. Don&#8217;t similar objections apply to Trinity Monotheism? If not, why not?)<\/li>\n<li><strong>Their &#8220;persons&#8221; aren&#8217;t.<\/strong> They can&#8217;t be, because a person is a substance, and they are not substances (though they are <a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/104\">&#8220;individuals&#8221;<\/a> &#8211; but any action or event is an individual so defined). They aren&#8217;t thinkers, but rather thoughts of a thinker (God). There are probably christology problems lurking here too. Do they hold that a <em>faculty<\/em> or <em>action<\/em> of God united with a complete human nature? Will the Chalcedonian creed allow a &#8220;nature&#8221; to be an action of God?<\/li>\n<li>As their &#8220;persons&#8221; aren&#8217;t, it is nonsense to say that each is all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful, etc. Thus, the <strong>idea that God is all those things because the &#8220;persons&#8221; are, is incoherent<\/strong>. They may say that each &#8220;stream&#8221; includes knowledge of all things &#8211; but God is the knower there, in each case, so the &#8220;omniscience&#8221; of these &#8220;streams&#8221; isn&#8217;t prior to God&#8217;s, and can&#8217;t explain God&#8217;s.<\/li>\n<li>The messing around with the word &#8220;divine&#8221; is <strong>the sort of thing that gives us philosophers a bad name<\/strong>; the <a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/104\">disjunctive definition<\/a> is a mere verbal fix, designed to allow us to say that the Son and God are &#8220;equally divine&#8221;. Their cat example doesn&#8217;t help, it seems to me. <a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/102\">Neither does their Cerberus analogy<\/a>, as <a href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/100\">my siamese twin case<\/a> shows. Better to say, &#8220;In our view, the Son isn&#8217;t fully divine, but he&#8217;s a mind of something which is.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>They wanted to ride the social trinitarian bandwagon, but I wonder if they can. It sounds sort of social trinitarian to say that the Three are so many &#8220;minds&#8221; (suggesting that their three selves, three thinking things). Also, the &#8220;center of consciousness&#8221; talk may suggest that. But when they talk of &#8220;three centers of self-consciousness, intentionality, and volition&#8221;, as best I can tell, that just means that God is conscious and wills in three different ways. So <strong>the appearance of social trinitarianism falls away<\/strong>, when you realize that they think the &#8220;persons&#8221; of the Trinity are just God&#8217;s thinking and acting in various ways, which somehow constitute unified streams or &#8220;centers&#8221; of experience. Then again, reading theologians, it&#8217;s none too clear what social trinitarianism is supposed to be!<\/li>\n<li>As far as I know, no mainstream trinitarian in the history of Christianity would settle for the Son being &#8220;fully divine&#8221; just in the sense of being a distinctive part of, or a mind of a divine thing. (Although, if you accept <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/url?sa=t&amp;ct=res&amp;cd=1&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fplato.stanford.edu%2Fentries%2Fdivine-simplicity%2F&amp;ei=B2dsRsTGMJT-gwO5u-zlBA&amp;usg=AFQjCNFOlPLqQqVGUMp7cGikq8Blr_RZ6A&amp;sig2=II75W65vxP7i2I5EhH_GEw\">divine simplicity<\/a>, you&#8217;ll say all God&#8217;s properties are one another, and each is &#8220;the same as&#8221; God. &#8211; but they reject Simplicity, rightly, I think.) Thus <strong>even if it succeeds, Trinity Monotheism isn&#8217;t a version of or metaphysical elaboration of the historic doctrine, as it aims to be<\/strong>. That doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s false; rather, it&#8217;s just wrong-headed to offer it as anything other than a major doctrinal revision. This is a minor point, as I think they admit it&#8217;s a revision, as they ditch divine simplicity, immutability, timelessness, and the generation and procession doctrines. There&#8217;s a tension here; if parts of the Catholic Tradition are dispensible, why try so hard to preserve the <a title=\"Dale on the Athanasian creed\" href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/50\" target=\"_blank\">Athanasian Creed<\/a> and the <a title=\"Dale on the Constatinopolitan Creed\" href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/49\" target=\"_blank\">Creed of Constantinople<\/a>?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>I conclude that Trinity Monotheism is a bold and brilliant failure.<\/strong> \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d like to hear in the comments what some of you readers out there think about all this. After a few days, we&#8217;ll probably move on to another recent theory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Time to close out this long series with a brief summary of my own observations on and objections to Trinity Monotheism. These aren&#8217;t all the one&#8217;s I&#8217;ve mentioned, but only the ones I think are the most relevant. And I should say that Joseph has raised some others as well, both in his guest post&hellip;&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/trinity-monotheism-part-9-some-final-thoughts-and-objections\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Read More &raquo;<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Trinity Monotheism Part 9: Some final thoughts and objections<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":116,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15,4,14,5,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-christology","category-heresy-orthodoxy","category-history","category-modalism","category-theories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34699,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions\/34699"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}